Essays - Tumblr Posts
(I’m popping a extra disclaimer here because I don’t know if I worded this very well, and I understand if this isnt the kind if question you feel comfortable answering, but this is a genuine question made in good faith. I also apologise if this sounds really stupid)
I read one of your recent asks about inclusivism and it reminded me of something that always sat in the back of my mind with this train of thought.
If we say that everyone regardless of religion, or absence of it, gets into heaven, doesn’t that seem disrespectful to their faith. By saying that people of other religions get into christian heaven, is that not inadvertently telling them that their religion or their gods are fake, and that when they die it’ll be okay because they’ll learn the real truth? I hope this doesn’t come across as blunt or disrespectful to anyone, I’ve just never be able to come to a conclusion that isn’t exclusive (which is kind of a depressing thought), but is also respectful. Because it’s a beautiful idea that god loves us all regardless of who we are or what we believe, but what about people who have the kind of faith we do in a completely different god, or multiple gods, do they have the same thoughts about us? that their god loves us even though we dont believe?
I feel like I’m asking questions I’m not supposed to but I’m just really curious about your perspective if this is something you’re comfortable answering.
Hey anon, this is an important question, so thanks for asking it! You don't sound "stupid"; you're thinking like a theologian :) I'm probably not going to do it justice, I'm afraid, but maybe folks will hop on with more ideas or resources?
This got really long, so the TL;DR: I agree with you, and so do a lot of theologians and other thinkers!
In a religiously diverse world, it makes sense that people of various religions ponder where people outside their religions "fit" in their understanding of both the present world and whatever form of afterlife they have.
If someone has a firm personal belief in certain things taking place after death (from heaven to reincarnation), I don't think it's inherently wrong to imagine all kinds of people joining them in that experience, when it points to how that person recognizes the inherent holiness and value of all kinds of people, and shows that they long for continued community with & flourishing for those people.
However, this contemplation should be done with great care — especially when your religion is the dominant one in your culture; especially if your religion has a long history (and/or present) of colonialism and coerced conversions.
Ultimately, humility and openness are key! It's fine to have your own beliefs about humanity's place in this life and after death, but make yourself mindful of your own limited perspective. Accept you might be wrong in part or in whole! And be open to learning from others' ideas, and truly listening to them if they say something in your ideas has caused them or their community tangible harm.
In the rest of this post, I'll focus on a Christian perspective and keep grappling with how to consider these questions while honoring both one's personal faith and people all religions...without coming to any solid conclusions (sorry, but I don't think there's any one-size-fits-all or fully satisfying answer!).
I'll talk a bit about inclusivism and how it fails pretty miserably in this regard, and point towards religious pluralism as a possibly better (tho still imperfect) option.
And as usual I'll say I highly recommend Barbara Brown Taylor's book Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others to any Christians / cultural Christians who want to learn more about entering into mutual relationship with people of other religions.
In previous posts, I brought up the concepts of exclusivism, inclusivism, and religious pluralism without digging into their academic definitions and histories — partially because it's A Lot for a tumblr post, but also because it's by no means in my sphere of expertise. I worried about misrepresenting any viewpoint if I tried to get all academic, so I just stuck to my own personal opinions instead — but looking back at some posts, I see I didn't do a great job of clarifying that's what I was doing!
So now I'll go into what scholars mean when talking about these different viewpoints, with a huge caveat that I'm not an expert; I'm just drawing from notes and foggy memories from old seminary classes + this article from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), and anyone interested in learning more should find scholarly articles or books rather than relying on some guy on tumblr!
Defining exclusivism, inclusivism, & religious pluralism
When we encounter traditions that offer differing and often conflicting "accounts of the nature of both mundane and supramundane reality, of the ultimate ends of human beings, and of the ways to achieve those ends" (IEP), how do we respond? Do we focus on difference and reject any truth in their views that conflicts with our views? Do we avoid looking too closely at the places we differ? try to find common ground? try to make their views fit ours?
Exclusivism, inclusivism, and religious pluralism are three categories into which we can place various responses to the reality of religious diversity.
It's important to note that this is only one categorization system one can use, and that these categories were developed within a Western, Christian context (by a guy named Alan Race in 1983). They are meant to be usable by persons of any religion — all sorts of people ask these questions about how their beliefs relate to others' beliefs — but largely do skew towards a Western, Christian way of understanding religion. (For one thing, there's a strong focus on salvation / afterlife and not all religions emphasize that stuff very much, if at all!)
Drawing primarily from this article on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), here are basic definitions of each:
Exclusivist positions maintain that "only one set of belief claims or practices can ultimately be true or correct (in most cases, those of the one holding the position). A Christian exclusivist would therefore hold that the beliefs of non-Christians (and perhaps even Christians of other denominations) are in some way flawed, if not wholly false..." . (From my old class notes — Exclusivist Christians believe 3 things are non-negotiable: the unique authority of Jesus Christ as the apex of revelation; Jesus as normative; salvation exclusively through repentance and faith in Christ's work on the cross. Some will allow that God does provide some truths about Godself and humanity through general revelation, including truths found in other religious traditions, but the Biggest most Important revelation is still Jesus.) .
Inclusivist positions "recognize the possibility that more than one religious tradition can contain elements that are true or efficacious, while at the same time hold that only one tradition expresses ultimate religious truth most completely." . Christian inclusivists tend to focus on salvation, claiming that non-Christians can still achieve salvation — still through Jesus Christ. Sometimes they hold that any non-Christian whose life happens to fit Jesus's call to love God and neighbor, etc., will be saved. Other times they hold that only non-Christians who never had the chance to learn about Jesus can be saved; if you know about Christianity and reject it, it doesn't matter how "good"you are, you're doomed. .
Pluralist positions hold that "more than one set of beliefs or practices can be, at least partially and perhaps wholly, true or correct simultaneously." For Christian pluralists, that means believing that Jesus is not the one Way to God / to heaven/salvation; Christianity is one way of many, usually conceived of as all being on equal footing, to connect to the Divine. .
(These three categories are not all encompassing; the IEP article also brings up relativism and skepticism.)
Issues with Exclusivism & Inclusivism
I hope the issues with exclusivism are clear, but to name a few:
Christians who are taught that all non-Christians (or even the "wrong kind" of Christians) are doomed to hell are taught to see those people as Projects more than people — there's a perceived urgent need to convert them asap in order to "save them." The only kind of relationship you'd form with one of them is centered in efforts to convert them, rather than to live and learn alongside them as they are.
Doesn't matter if they are already happily committed to a different religion. In your eyes, they're wrong about feeling fulfilled and connected to the Divine.
Doesn't matter if you have to resort to violent and coercive practices like wiping out all signs of non-Christian culture or kidnapping non-Christian children to raise Christian — the ends justify the means because you're looking out for their "immortal souls."
...But what about inclusivism? If you're a Christian inclusivist, you aren't forcing anyone to convert to Christianity right now! You acknowledge that non-Christians can live holy and fulfilling lives! You even acknowledge that there's scraps of value in their valid-but-not-as-valid-as-Christianity religions! So what's the problem?
Turns out that this is a major case of one's good intentions not being nearly as important as one's impact.
You may be pushing back against exclusivism's outright refusal that non-Christians have any connection to the divine at all, which is nice and all — but by saying that non-Christians will basically become Christian after they die, you are still perpetuating our long history of coercive conversions.
There's a reason some scholars argue that inclusivism isn't actually a separate category from, but a sub-category of, exclusivism: you're still saying everyone has to be Christian, "so luckily you'll See The Light and become Christian after you die :)"
This is very reasonably offensive to many non-Christians. If nothing else, it's ludicrously smug and paternalistic! I won't get into it here but it only gets worse when some inclusivist positions try to get all Darwinian and start arranging religions from lower to higher, with Christianity as the "evolutionary" apex of religion ://
For now, I'll only go into detail about Catholic Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner's particular version of inclusivism, because it's quite common and really highlights the paternalism:
Rahner's Anonymous Christians:
A question that Catholics and other Christians struggled with in the 20th century was this: If non-Christians cannot be saved (because they held firm in believing that salvation must be in and through Christ), what happens if someone never even had the chance to learn about Christianity? Surely a loving God wouldn't write them an automatic ticket to hell when they're non-Christian through no fault of their own, right?
German Jesuit Karl Rahner's response was to conceive of a sort of abstract version of Christianity for non-Christians who lived good, faithful lives outside of official (what he called "constituted") Christianity:
"Anonymous Christianity means that a person lives in the grace of God and attains salvation outside of explicitly constituted Christianity. ...Let us say, a Buddhist monk…who, because he follows his conscience, attains salvation and lives in the grace of God; of him I must say that he is an anonymous Christian; if not, I would have to presuppose that there is a genuine path to salvation that really attains that goal, but that simply has nothing to do with Jesus Christ. But I cannot do that. And so, if I hold if everyone depends upon Jesus Christ for salvation, and if at the same time I hold that many live in the world who have not expressly recognized Jesus Christ, then there remains in my opinion nothing else but to take up this postulate of an anonymous Christianity." - Karl Rahner in Dialogue (1986), p. 135.
So someone who has intentionally devoted themselves to another religion, someone who does good work in that religion's name, is...secretly, unbeknownst to them, actually Christian?
I hope the offensiveness of that is clear — the condescension in implying these people are ignorant of what religion they "really" belong to! the assumption that Good deeds & virtues are always inherently Christian deeds & virtues! the arrogance of being so sure your own religion is The One Right Way that you have to construct a "back door" (as Hans Küng describes it) into it to shove in all these poor people who for whatever reason can't or don't choose to join it!
One theologian who criticized the paternalism of "anonymous Christianity" is John Hick, who was one of the big advocates for religious pluralism as a more respectful way of understanding non-Christian religions. So let's finally talk some more about pluralism!
Religious Pluralism!
As defined earlier, religious pluralist positions hold that there are many paths to the divine, and that all religions have access to some truths about the divine.
For Christians, this means rejecting those 3 non-negotiables of exclusionists about Christianity being the one true religion and Jesus being the one path to salvation. Instead of claiming that Christianity is the "most advanced" religion, pluralism claims that Christianity is just one religion among many, with no unique claim on the truth.
Some other pluralist points:
Pluralism resists antisemitic claims that Christianity is the "fulfillment" of (or that it "supercedes") Judaism.
Various religions provide independent access to salvation rather than everyone's salvation relying on Christ. (Note the still very Christian-skewed lens here in emphasizing salvation at all though!)
When we notice how different religions' truth claims conflict with one another, pluralists reconcile this by talking about how one's experience of truth is subjective.
Pluralism tends to give more authority to human experience than sacred texts
John Hicks' pluralist position
I mentioned before that Hicks is one of the big names in the religious pluralism scene. The IEP article I drew from earlier goes into much greater detail about his views and responses to it in the section titled "c. John Hick: the Pluralistic Hypothesis," but for a brief overview:
His central claim is that "diverse religious traditions have emerged as various finite, historical responses to a single transcendent, ultimate, divine reality. The diversity of traditions (and the belief claims they contain) is a product of the diversity of religious experiences among individuals and groups throughout history, and the various interpretations given to these experiences."
"As for the content of particular belief claims, Hick understands the personal deities of those traditions that posit them...as personae of the Real, explicitly invoking the connotation of a theatrical mask in the Latin word persona."
"Hick claims that all religious understandings of the Real are on equal footing insofar as they can only offer limited, phenomenal representations of transcendent truth."
We must accept that world religions are fundamentally different from each other, rather than falling into platitudes about how "we're all the same deep down"
Each religion has its own particular and comprehensive framework for understanding the world and human experience (i.e. we shouldn't use the normative Christian framework to describe other faiths)
Another angle: hospitality
As various philosophers and theologians have responded to and expanded upon pluralist frameworks, one big concept that some emphasize is hospitality: that all of us regardless of religion have an obligation to welcome others to all that is ours, if and when they have need of it — especially when they are of different cultures or religions from us.
Hospitality requires respect for those under our care, honoring and protecting their differences.
When we are the ones in need of hospitality, we should be able to expect the same.
Hospitality implies being able to anticipate our guest's needs, but we need to accept the impossibility of being able to guess every need, so communication is key!
Liberation theology & Pluralism
I also appreciate what liberation theologians have brought into the discussion. Here's from the IEP article:
"Liberation theology, which advocates a religious duty to aid those who are poor or suffering other forms of inequality and oppression, has had a significant influence on recent discussions of pluralism. The struggle against oppression can be seen as providing an enterprise in which members of diverse religious traditions can come together in solidarity.
"Paul F. Knitter, whose work serves as a prominent theological synthesis of liberation and pluralist perspectives, argues that engaging in interreligious dialogue is part and parcel of the ethical responsibility at the heart of liberation theology. He maintains not only that any liberation theology ought to be pluralistic, but also that any adequate theory of religious pluralism ought to include an ethical dimension oriented toward the goal of resisting injustice and oppression.
"Knitter claims that, if members of diverse religions are interested (as they should be) in encountering each other in dialogue and resolving their conflicts, this can only be done on the basis of some common ground. ..."
Knitter sees suffering as that common ground: "Suffering provides a common cause with which diverse religious traditions are concerned and towards which they can come together to craft a common agenda. Particular instances of suffering will, of course, differ from each other in their causes and effects; likewise, the practical details of work to alleviate suffering will almost necessarily be fleshed out differently by different religions, at different times and in different places. Nevertheless, Knitter maintains that suffering itself is a cross-cultural and universal phenomenon and should thus serve as the reference point for a practical religious pluralism. Confronting suffering will naturally give rise to solidarity, and pluralist respect and understanding can emerge from there."
Knitter also sees the planet as a source of literal common ground for us all: "Earth not only serves as a common physical location for all religious traditions, but it also provides these traditions with what Knitter calls a 'common cosmological story' (1995, p. 119). ...Knitter makes a case that different religious traditions share an ecological responsibility and that awareness of this shared responsibility, as it continues to emerge, can also serve as a basis for mutual understanding."
When Knitter and other liberation theologians speak of suffering or earth care as rallying points for interreligious solidarity, it's important to point out that such solidarity doesn't happen automatically: it is something we have to choose to commit to. We have to be courageous about challenging those who would pin suffering on another religious or cultural group. We have to be courageous about having difficult conversations, again and again. We have to learn how to work together for common goals even while accepting where we differ.
How to end this long ass post?
My hope is that as you read (or skimmed) all this, you were thinking about your own personal beliefs: where, if anywhere, do they fit among all these ideas? where would you like them to fit?
And, in the end, did I really address anon's question about whether it's disrespectful to people of other religions to assert that everyone is loved by God, or gets into heaven? Not really, because I don't know. I think it probably depends on context, and how one puts it, and how certain one acts about their ideas about God and heaven.
For me, it always comes down to humility about my own limited perspective, even while asserting that we all have a right to our personal beliefs, including ideas about what comes after this life.
When I imagine all human beings together in whatever comes next, I hope I do so not out of a desire for assimilation into my religion, but a desire to continue to learn from and alongside all kinds of people and beliefs. I hope I remain open to learning about how other people envision both what comes after death, and more importantly, what they think about life here and now. What can I learn from them about truth, kindness, justice? How can we work together to achieve those things for all creation, despite and in and through our differences?
I'll end with Eboo Patel's description of religious pluralism, which sums up much of how I feel, from his memoir Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim:
"Religious pluralism is neither mere coexistence nor forced consensus. It is a form of proactive cooperation that affirms the identities of the constituent communities while emphasizing that the wellbeing of each and all depends on the health of the whole. It is the belief that the common good is best served when each community has a chance to make its unique contribution."
___
Further resources:
Explore my #religious pluralism tag for more thoughts and quotes
You might also enjoy wandering through my #interfaith tag
Two podcast episodes that draw from Eboo Patel, Barbara Brown Taylor, and other wonderful people: "No One Owns God: Readying yourself for respectful interfaith encounters" and "It's good to have wings, but you have to have roots too: Cultivating your own faith while embracing religious pluralism"
My tag with excerpts from Holy Envy
Post that includes links to various questions about heaven
Here’s a post where I talk about why I don’t believe in hell
My evangelism tag (tl;dr: I’m staunchly against prosletyzing to anyone who doesn’t explicitly request more info about Christianity)
Things read in September
Essays and Articles:
The Transfeminist Manifesto
I'm Broke and Mostly Friendless and I've Wasted My Whole Life
How TV Replaced the Commute as A Workday Wind-Down
A Message About Messages by Ursula K LeGuin
Irreversible Shift
The Essence of Peopling
Time Loop Narratives Are About Love
Mother Tongue
Don't Neglect the UK's Indigenous Languages
Yes, Actually, Individual Responsibility Is Essential to Solving the Climate Crisis
'Whitey on the Moon': Gil Scott-Heron's Poem Resonates As Billionaires Race to Space
What It's Like to Detox in Jail
I Thought Jail Would Help Me Get Clean. I Was Dead Wrong.
Who Wrote the Poem At the End of "The Shape of Water"?
Birding Is For Everyone: Broadening Horizons of A Popular Pastime
How Sei Shonagon Invented Your Tumblr
Why Your Feminist T Shirt Might Not Be Feminist After All
Guns Don't Kill People, School Psychologists Do
The BuzzFeedification of Mental Health
What Happens to Planes When They Are Retired?
Fungi are weird
Disney is Quietly Placing Classic Fox Movies into its Vault--and That's Worrying
Stop Assuming That I'm Just Writing About Myself
Why are women's novels always mistaken for autobiography?
Who is "That Girl" and Why is TikTok Obsessed with Her?
Scientists are working on a pill for loneliness
We all hate our jobs--and it's Silicon Valley's fault
Lost during Nazi rule in Germany, one of the world's first pro-gay films has finally been restored for modern viewers
How the Pentagon Leaned on Hollywood to Sell the War in Afghanistan
The Mushroom's Small Stature and Subtle Strength
Poetry:
The Long and Short of It by Richard Siken
Ash by Tracy K. Smith
A Second Train Song for Gary by Jack Spicer
How to Write a Poem in a Time of War by Joy Harjo
Leda, Broken, Winged by La Loca
She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo
Sleeping in the Forest by Mary Oliver
Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
How to Be a Poet by Wendell Berry
Mycenae Nightwatch by Seamus Heaney
Books:
Your Beauty Mark: The Ultimate Guide to Eccentric Glamour by Dita Von Teese
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
The Sadist's Bible by Nicole Cushing
Town Without Streets by Junji Ito
Okay so tmr I have 4 exams
FOURRRRRR (arabic math Socail studies and supplementery reader)
so instead if being a smart human being I decided it would be a great idea to rematch my favorite high school production of heathers (lmk if you want it) but like the thing doesn't look like it was made by high schoolers like they are all amazing and shit but anyways that's not the point
The point is I'm gonna fail all four of them I also have a French composition due in two days that I did nothing about and I'm gonna cry cause I was doing so good in French this year but now I'm gonna fail this and it will bring my entire average down so help pls
Do you have any advice for talking to people who aren't well-informed about what is going on in Gaza? One of my really close friends for over 10 years now has really conservative parents and she just :// she just kind of believes a lot of the conservative stuff they say and she hears others around her say. After the attacks of Oct. 7th, I think I remember her saying that the Bible says we should always stand with Israel which is just so :((
I want to inform her but I'm unsure of how to, and if it would even work. I'm scared of her response because I really love her and we've been so close for so long but I don't feel comfortable with her being so uninformed and I'm scared of her response. Do you have any advice and even pray for me to be given wisdom on how to handle this with care and love? Thank you ^^
Hey there! Thank you for your courage in even wanting to start a hard conversation with a friend about this vital topic. I'm going to offer some ideas, but ultimately you know this friend better than I could, so if something I say doesn't seem like it'll work with your situation, adapt or discard it.
I also invite others to add on ideas or encouragement. If you know of resources that are helpful for talking about Palestine with folks who are steeped in pro-Israel propaganda, please share!
___
Before delving into this topic with her, start by asking yourself what you're hoping she'll unlearn and relearn. What's a reasonable goal to move her towards?
Chances are, she's not going to move from unquestioning support of Israel to "Decolonize Palestine" in a day!
Moving her towards a simple agreement that at least some of the things Israel does cannot be supported is a good first step, and even that may take time and patience.
Prepare yourself to be happy about even the smallest baby steps in opening her perspective. "Ceasefire now!" may be the bare minimum in what is ultimately needed for true justice for Palestine, but it is an important step. If you can make progress towards her agreeing with a simple ceasefire, that's worth celebrating.
You'll also want to think in advance about where you're hoping her changed perspective will take her. Do you see her on the front lines of protests and marches? Or will you be satisfied if she makes some changes in where she spends her money (boycotting Starbucks, McDonalds, etc.), doesn't shut down pro-Palestine comments, etc.?
Again, being realistic and celebrating even small changes is helpful to keep from frustrating yourself or her!
So...how do you start a conversation that leads to that?
Wait for a time when you both are fairly relaxed, and have enough time that conversation won't be rushed.
Prepare yourself to hear some resistance and possibly even some really crappy things regurgitated when you first broach the subject. Do your best to remain calm, and not to jump straight into correcting every little thing she says — I know how hard that can be, but if you have hope that she'll be open to changing perspective, you want to establish yourself as a space where she feels safe enough to unpack the bullshit without being shut down at every turn.
For instance, in the scenario where she said "the Bible says we should always stand with Israel," responding immediately with "no it doesn't!!" would shut down conversation.
Instead, you might start with open-ended questions the two of you can explore together: "I wonder what the Bible means when it talks about Israel. Would the biblical authors recognize today's Israel as being the Israel they were talking about? / Is the Israel of today the same as the Israel of the Bible?" "What does it mean to you to 'stand with Israel'?" "Does that have to require sending them extreme military weapons?"
As you ask questions together, focus on finding common ground with her:
Does your friend agree that innocent people should be kept as safe as possible in military conflicts?
Does she agree that people of different faiths and cultures should be able to coexist?
I appreciate this post's advice on utilizing instead of challenging someone's deeply held values to guide them out from their rightwing radicalized views.
If your friend seems unwilling to talk about this...
It's okay to table the conversation if things start to get heated or she's shutting down. Let he know this topic is deeply meaningful to you and that's why you want to talk about it with her, as a friend who means a lot to you as well.
If there have been times in the past where she's realized what her family says about a topic has been anywhere from somewhat misinformed to utter bullshit, you might be able to remind her of that past time.
Do your best to make it clear that you are not judging her for what she currently believes — we can't help what we're raised in! You're just hopeful that, like in those past situations with other topics, the two of you can talk things out.
Did realizing that she didn't have all the information on a topic help in the past? Maybe remind her of that too, and invite her to team up together in finding the missing information on this topic as well — which leads me to...
Come with resources.
For exploring those open-ending questions I brought up before, it'll help for you to be pretty well informed in advance both about current events and recent history, and about how Christian theology's been used to advance Israel's agenda.
...Or, if you think your friend would prefer to learn along the way with you, it'll be good for you to at least know of resources the two of you can look at together!
You don't have to have all the answers; you can tell her, "I don't know enough either yet. I'd love to learn together with you." Framing it as something mutual, rather than you lecturing her or assigning her homework or judging her current ignorance, might cultivate that space for mutual growth that will benefit you both!
So here are some resources I recommend:
For questions about theology, including disconnecting biblical Israel from modern Israel, I highly recommend Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, the People, the Bible (2023) by Christian Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb. If you don't have time for a whole book, I summarized the thing in an article that takes about 30 minutes to read. .
Another, less academic / more storytelling-formatted book that pulls in perspectives from Jews and Muslims, Palestinians and non-Palestinians, queer folk and more, that I find super valuable in summing up a lot of the fraught history and unpacking propaganda around Israel that so many of us have been taught to take as given, is A Land with a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism. .
Then there's keeping up with news using media outlets that don't sugarcoat Israel's violence. My personal favorite to listen to daily is Democracy Now!, which you can read/watch online or listen to as a podcast. A whole hour of news every day may be more than your friend can keep up with, however, so... .
...a briefer news option is @ So.informed on Instagram. Their posts sum up the big sweeping picture of what's going on, and help put it in context with accessible language. If your friend has Instagram, this could be a great source for her to start getting another perspective on what's going on. .
Similarly, @ letstalkpalestine is another Instagram account that explores history and current events in a succinct, accessible way.
One last thought: be ready to offer comfort.
It's hard to realize you've been misinformed about something important — especially when it's people close to you who've taught you what you thought was right. It takes a ton of courage and humility to realize where you need to change.
Your friend might become emotional about all this; that might look like grief, or rage, or even dissociating, feeling numb. Be ready to offer comfort, to remind her that what she thought was not her fault — that we're all steeped in things we have to work to unlearn, and you're proud of her for being open to learning.
And again I'll mention that if things start getting intense, it's okay to take a break! You don't want either of you burning out halfway through. You can take this process one small step per day, or even per week.
This struggle for liberation and justice is a long one — it's been decades unfolding, and it'll take a long while more. It's urgent, yes, but at the same time, rushing your friend won't aid the effort. Patience is much more likely to bear fruit that lasts.
___
I hope this helps somewhat! I'll be holding you and your friend in my prayers.
May the Spirit of Justice guide your words and actions; may She guard you from frustration; may she open your friend to hearing you out and entering into conversation with you. <3
Check out my latest short story Beneath the Riverbed for a dose of African speculative fiction.
Also, if you reblog, feel free to do some self-promo of your work and include a link. I'm going to link a short story I published, "Tears in a Bottle" below. You never know who might want to read your writings. 😀
I’ve been procrastinating and now I gotta get this Crucible essay done. My wrath with be evident
curious about what's in store for you for 2023? :D
let AO3 decide!
(this is a random generator that will give you four (4) ao3 tags, so you know, warnings for what that usually entails)
are you ever writing a paper and you're just like "I have no idea what point I'm trying to make but I sure do have evidence for it"
My last two brain cells trying to write the conclusion of a paper I ENTIRELY bs’d
How to outline at 2k+ word college essay, by a 4th year Sociology-Criminology student
Introduction
Thesis statement
Thesis should reference the topics of each “section” of your paper
Section 1
Point 1
Section 1 intro
What is point 1
Explain point 1 (section1′s thesis)
If point 1, then…
What is true because of point 1
Use ACE if it’s a research paper!
Assert (1 or 2 sentences)
Cite (however long your in-text citation is)
Explain (explain it which a few more sentences. Bam. 5 sentence paragraph. Piece of cake.)
Section 1 conclusion
Section 2
(Repeat section 1)
Really just repeat the section thing until you’ve got it all
This will vary depending on the paper, obviously
Conclusion!
This can be more than 1 paragraph
Just reword a sentence or two from each section’s point/conclusion
Restate thesis
Bam. You have an essay
Bonus: I’m not sure about other schools of thought, but I know some sociological papers will make you give each of your sections actual section titles and junk. I’ve taken to doing this while writing other papers and then just going back and taking the section titles out when I’m done with them. All the paragraphs should flow from one point to the next without extra explanation anyway, assuming they’re organized like your thesis (or your thesis is organized like your paper). Really they’re just an organization tool while writing the paper. Idk, it’s you’re paper. Remember: you’re the boss.
Essays
Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love
also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!
Literature + Writing
Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag
The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*
Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*
A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi
How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik
Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone
Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman
Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom
The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*
The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes
Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*
Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*
Why I Write - George Orwell*
Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*
Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)
Looking at War - Susan Sontag*
Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz
Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker
The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews
In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*
On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*
On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*
Kalighat Paintings - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri
Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past - Maël Renouard
Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel
Cities
Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash
Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*
Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur
The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*
Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur
From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective - Andrew Harris
The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay
The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel
Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan
A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp
The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne
The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*
The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour
Philosophy
The trolley problem problem - James Wilson
A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram
Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*
Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer
The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*
The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape
If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood
Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart
The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*
The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*
History
The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan
The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*
The Anti-Che - Jay Nordlinger
From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*
All By Myself - Martha Bailey*
The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder
The sea/ocean
Rim of Life - Manu Pillai
Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery
‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*
The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*
Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti
Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*
Assorted ones on India
A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *
Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash
Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee
Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu
The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*
Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta
Our worldview is Delhi based*
Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)
‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*
Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh
When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger
Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*
Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha
MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*
Music
Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo
Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder
The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*
Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*
How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield
Concert for Bangladesh
From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen
Gender
Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane
The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin
Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*
Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe
Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*
Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack
Food
How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)
Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee
Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu
Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*
From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*
The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*
How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*
Pav from the Nau
A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes
Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)
Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)
Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*
Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua
The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*
Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*
Travel
The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism
Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan
On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose
On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*
More random assorted ones
The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*
In El Salvador - Joan Didion
Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee
Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell
Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*
What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*
The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith
Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*
Credibility and Mystery - John Berger
happy reading :)
Essays
Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love
also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!
Literature + Writing
Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag
The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*
Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*
A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi
How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik
Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone
Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman
Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom
The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*
The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes
Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*
Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*
Why I Write - George Orwell*
Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*
Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)
Looking at War - Susan Sontag*
Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz
Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker
The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews
In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*
On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*
On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*
Kalighat Paintings - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri
Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past - Maël Renouard
Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel
Cities
Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash
Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*
Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur
The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*
Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur
From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective - Andrew Harris
The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay
The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel
Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan
A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp
The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne
The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*
The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour
Philosophy
The trolley problem problem - James Wilson
A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram
Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*
Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer
The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*
The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape
If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood
Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart
The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*
The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*
History
The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan
The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*
The Anti-Che - Jay Nordlinger
From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*
All By Myself - Martha Bailey*
The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder
The sea/ocean
Rim of Life - Manu Pillai
Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery
‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*
The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*
Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti
Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*
Assorted ones on India
A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *
Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash
Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee
Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu
The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*
Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta
Our worldview is Delhi based*
Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)
‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*
Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh
When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger
Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*
Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha
MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*
Music
Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo
Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder
The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*
Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*
How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield
Concert for Bangladesh
From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen
Gender
Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane
The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin
Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*
Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe
Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*
Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack
Food
How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)
Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee
Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu
Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*
From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*
The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*
How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*
Pav from the Nau
A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes
Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)
Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)
Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*
Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua
The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*
Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*
Travel
The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism
Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan
On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose
On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*
More random assorted ones
The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*
In El Salvador - Joan Didion
Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee
Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell
Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*
What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*
The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith
Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*
Credibility and Mystery - John Berger
happy reading :)
Just completed and submitted the final version of my Extended Essay !!! °˖✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧˖°
So I compiled lists of words that I found super super useful in making it easier for me to finish any essay !! Here is a masterpost of some sort with transition words + key vocabs grouped together for easy access as well as an IB IOC ‘cheat sheet’ I used for my english LAL orals last year (though most commentaries follow a similar structure so its generalisable) ~
Good luck with your essays !!!
… oops just realised I forgot to bullet point one of the lists
Do you want a guide to writing a research paper but you don't want to scroll a mile on your dash? This post is for you, buddy.
This book (book????) or tidily-laid-out-shitpost or whatever you want to call it is a handy-dandy guide to college-level humanities research methods and paper-writing.
This is a step-by-step follow along of my process as I, a person with a BA in English Lit, navigate writing a paper on George Orwell for my English 101 class.
This is NOT carefully crafted, it is literally a post that I made.
That said, it is a post that I made that is twelve thousand words on how to write a paper and now comes with a table of contents and headers and fancy alt-text and image descriptions and is forty fucking pages.
This document includes:
How to read an academic paper
How to skim a book for a college class
How to prioritize what sources to use
How to write an organized, cohesive research paper with an introduction, support paragraphs, and conclusion
(i managed to only say "fuck" six times in forty pages so I'm not taking them out.)
ANYWAY for a PDF click here.
If you want it in .docx click here.
Free to use for any reason, free to reproduce, give them to whoever, just don't sell them. (if you want to credit me if you do share them, ms-demeanor.tumblr.com is perfectly fine)
Happy finals season, babes. Good luck with those papers.
“What are you going to do about past crimes which have shattered your preconceptions about the nature of life?”
my guy. what.
Absolutely insane lines to just drop in the middle of an academic text btw. Feeling so normal about this.
[ A Critical History of English Literature, Vol. 1, Prof. David Daiches, first published in 1960 ]
I wish I'd had this when I was still in English Comp II. Seriously. This would have helped so much. I had enough trouble with the topics for the essays as it was without dealing with the struggle to actually write it.
It’s essay writing season for tons of students!
After being a college writing tutor for over a year, I thought I would share my advice with all you awesome people on tumblr. This is how I write essays, but if you’ve got more tips, feel free to add them below.
Happy writing. You can do it!
Life Tip #50
instead of thinking it as writing a thesis for your essay, think of it more as spill the tea-sis in order truly blow them away! what’s the ultimate hooker in your gossip article babe?? that’s how you’ll get them
As an active video essay watcher I can proudly say I don't agree/like every video essay I see.
I think we can all agree the video essay community on YouTube has grown over time and when an online community increases in size, it starts to get slightly toxic. Unfortunately, the same can be said for video essays on YouTube. Not everything is accurate and people will just believe everything.
Don't let video essays shape your opinions on certain things, watch video essays with the aim of learning something new and seeing a new perspective. Also watch it with care, some YouTubers will do anything for views. By anything, I mean throwing in big words and fake stats to seem "legit". Sometimes they'll discuss topics that are trending, point out how it's bad and then proceed to do the opposite of what the preach.
An example will be Zoe Unlimited, a popular YouTuber whose main content is video essays. She's posted a lot of content regarding body image, how social media pushes unrealistic standards and how young girls develop eating disorders because of these things. But then she proceeds to post a lot of diet/eating disorder sort of videos and it's funny cus these kind of videos are her most popular videos, like wtf??? LMAO
I'm not the first person to notice this, there are a few videos on it. This one is my favourite!
The top comment in that video says something her just summarizing popular discussions for her video essays and I could not agree more. It's the same for a lot of other YouTubers, not really one original thought!
Nothing wrong with that in my opinion, some topics do need a great deal of media coverage. But let's not deny Zoe and a bunch of video essay YouTubers are mostly there for views.
Also, I'm starting to really doubt people even watch the videos anymore lmao. It seems like they just read the title and the comments then form their own opinions based on everyone else's. Like I understand not finishing the whole thing (cus sometimes I don't), but at least watch a bit to get a general idea!
It really is just building a whole generation of people with a herd mentality, like some people aren't really willing to dissect or reflect on the content they consume anymore.
Nonetheless, I still really like video essays. I just always like to approach them with common sense and a bit of critical thinking.
There’s something about the story of Orpheus and Eurydice that’s held my soul in a vise gripe since I saw Hadestown
And I think it’s the fact that the story is of course, devastating, but it doesn’t mean anything
Not to say that it’s meaningless, but that so many other stories in mythology are used to explain natural phenomena or take down histories or tell cautionary tales about what happens when you mess with the gods
No, in this case, it’s just a tale of two people who loved each other, and would go to the ends of the earth to save one another. It wasn’t about destiny or being forced down some awful path or making terrible mistakes and being filled with regret. At its core, this is just a story about love, in it’s most human vulnerability and strength.
I mean, think about someone you love. Doesn’t even have to be a romantic partner. I know, in my absolute core, that I would go to the ends of the earth and back and around again for my partner. I’d die for my sister. I’d live for my dog.
Sure, Orpheus walks the lonely road to hell and nearly makes it back. And maybe, sometime in history, there was a man named Orpheus who loved his wife and when she was taken from him, he followed, in one way or another, never to return. It’s not vengeance. It’s not destiny. In a way, it’s not even valor or chivalry or bravery. It’s just love. At its core, it’s just love. And maybe the people left behind honored that by telling their story.
So it is a sad song, an old tale. And we sing it again and again, because we hope that if someday we have to follow our lives into hell with no hope of returning, there will be some vestige of our love left behind.
So if I am remembered for anything, thousands of years after I have gone, let it be for my love.
I was here, and I loved, and I left with love, and I didn’t get to come back, so sing my song, in my absence, with love.